The disclosure generally relates to the field of data processing, and more particularly to data processing for storage efficiency.
An enterprise level data center or storage system can be logically separated into a storage front end and a storage backend. The storage front end includes devices that are exposed to clients of the storage system. The storage front end devices may be referred to as storage controllers, servers, or filers. The storage backend includes devices that host data and serve data to the storage front end. The storage backend devices may be referred to as storage arrays, storage devices, attached storage, or networked storage.
An organization with a storage system configured for archival or cold storage purposes will have high storage density (e.g., shingled magnetic recording (SMR) devices) in the storage backend and have minimal computational resources (e.g., low cost processors and a relatively small amount of memory) in the storage front end. The minimal computational resources will often be devoted to reliability and space management. An archival or cold storage system is often designed with minimizing cost per gigabyte (GB) as the primary goal. Such a system can be characterized with write-and-read-rarely patterns. Thus, the system is not configured for maximizing input/output operations per second (IOPS).